Thom Craver Recent Posts

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• April Fools Follies
• Micro-hoo! Can Microsoft really buy the world?
• Lego Finds New Niche with Console Gaming
• 7 Years, 253 Languages and 9 Million Articles later…
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• Google Adds Presentations

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Obama Everywhere. That’s what his Web site shows in the bottom-right corner. He’s on Facebook, MySpace and Linked In. He’s got channels and profiles on You Tube, Flickr, Twitter and Eventful. There’s even a my.barackobama.com for you to do your own part to help his campaign and have a free site to coordinate it all.

Now, the candidate who took the Internet by storm is looking for a Search Engine Marketing expert. He - or his campaign - apparently knows there’s more to SEM than stuffing HTML code on a page. Read more

My definitive answer: Hell, yes.

OK, for the squeamish, truly, it’s nothing. I’ve never has any surgical procedure outside of having my wisdom teeth pulled. When I laid down on that table and saw nothing but surgical masks, gloves and those bright, silver surgical lights, I really started to wonder what I was getting myself into.

But then, the next few events happened in a span of less than 6 minutes:

• my eye was taped open (weird, but not scary)
• I was pelted with lots of eye drops
• there was a fan sound and some air
• a lot of blurry lights and happenings above my head
• a few loud buzzes

After all that, I was happy to find the lights and the faces looking down on me back in better focus and the doctor said “you did great.” Read more

I confess myself disappointed. I finally break my 2+ years of not pulling a practical joke on April Fool’s Day and the Internet on the whole turns up a mediocre performance.

First, Googler and practical funnyman extraordinaire Matt Cutts decided he was “skipping April Fools this year.” What?! OK, well so it turned out that his post, itself, was actually the joke. But really Matt, we expect more from you than a faux Firefox tattoo. Although I did like the iPhone feature gag.

As for Google, Virgle was neat and had a bunch of people talking. But the Google Custom Time was truly clever. How many people actually fell for that one? Read more

Apparently, Microsoft is frustrated with being #3 behind Google, offering today to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 Billion in cash and stocks. this bid came right after Yahoo! reported a weak fourth-quarter, saw its stock price close at its lowest in four years and announced a plan to cut 1,000 jobs.

If Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang finally caves in and accepts a buyout offer, it would still make Micro-hoo! number two behind Google. But Jerry Yang has always thought that he would be the one to lead Yahoo! out of its current slide. Read more

Marketing 101: How does one get more people to buy more of one’s product? Lego’s knows.

Lego Star Wars: The Video Game hit the scene in April 2005. It rode hot off the heels of the popularity of LucasArt’s movie release of Star Wars Episode III. LucasArts and company followed the game up with Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, based on - you guessed it - the original Star Wars movies (Episodes IV, V, and VI). Both games were a hit through their creative use of animated Lego characters and some really humorously quirky expressions.
Three months ago, LucasArts and TT Games teamed up again for Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. With only subtle changes, the publisher managed to capture the Wii and Playstation 3 audiences, which missed out on the original two games. Read more

Happy Birthday Wikipedia. One of the college student’s best friends, and one of many college professors’ worst irritations, the world’s online “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” started this day (January 15) in 2001. Read more

A while back, a colleague passed me a link to an article about the math problems in Excel 2007. In and of itself, it seems quite amusing that Microsoft continues its self-incriminating trend of distributing broken software, seemingly not even trying to break the stereotype or the techie world jokes we make at their expense.

Granted, I’m a little late to post this and the response from Microsoft and subsequent fix was released and distributed in December. But the bigger story here is the ad the popped up inline with the article promoting - what else - a competing product to Excel and the rest of the Microsoft Office suite, Google Apps (formerly Google Documents and Spreadsheets). Read more

Well, now they have your basic office software package. As of last night, Google has added presentations to Google Docs and Google Apps. For all your PowerPoint users, you can upload your PowerPoint Files. Unfortunately it does not yet support pptx files, the new Office 2007 format. What’s really surprising to me is that ODP files - Open Document Presentation format - is not supported yet, either. Read more

Microsoft - Wake up! You’re not Google.

Perhaps we should give Microsoft an A for effort in trying to keep up with the Joneses at Google. As my friends at Search Engine Land have reported, Microsoft as built a software package in their latest attempt to dominate computer users everywhere.

The new Windows Live Services bundles together an email client, blog writing software, instant messaging client, photo gallery helper, Microsoft Live Search browser toolbar and browser content filtering software. The products appear to help get the word out that Microsoft - not to be outdone by Google or Yahoo! - can also host blogs, photos and have a cool toolbar that works with ANY browser. Read more

Google has always tested new features and algorithms live on their site. Sure, right? What better sampling of data and user feedback than your regular, unsuspecting user base.

As I sat today searching, I couldn’t help but notice a new look sported by the leading search engine. Gone are the links to image, news and other searches from above the search box. Instead, it’s been moved to a left sidebar. Read more

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